A Mid-Year Assessment to Launch Us into Post-Christmas Learning

My 2-year-old grandson and I were poring over the airport page in a Richard Scarry book. His parents had clearly been preparing him for Grandma and Grandpa’s impending departure after a 2-week Christmas visit. We discussed all the different aircraft pictured and confirmed several times that I was going to go on a passenger jet—not a helicopter, a crop duster, or a military plane. He asked me to sing a song, so I launched into “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” but only got through, “Don’t know when I’ll be back again,” before tearing up. 

At the same time, I’m also getting excited about what I’m getting on the jet plane to return to: a classroom full of students who have learned a lot so far this year, and are ready to learn a lot more. How do I know? Part of my exam right before Christmas was to have 10th graders analyze how they had grown so far this year as readers, writers, thinkers, and speakers/listeners. They had to make a claim (framed as a letter to me, to parents/guardians, or to themselves) and supply specific evidence from all we had done first semester. I was pleased with their answers when I assessed them before break, and reviewing them now is getting me back in the mood for returning to teaching and learning on Monday. Here are some of the things they said:

Reading: Students noted that they grew in their appreciation of reading and their ability to read with purpose:

• Reading was one of my least favorite things to do. When I took Honors English class, I was surprised about how the reading pace of this class was very fast…. However, after going through this class for a month, I started getting used to it. Reading started to become my everyday lifestyle. I also noticed that reading isn’t that bad. Reading was like watching a movie.
• I have learned that reading novels is not simply just for understanding the plot but it is also to help understand the world and myself.
• (Letter to self voice) Before this semester, you read without purpose. You read to be informed or to be entertained, but never to grasp what the writer is truly trying to convey. Through books like Night, Cry, the Beloved Country, or even the book about Stephen Curry you read, you were able to tell why they are significant. Night taught you about inequality and discrimination. This memoir was important because instead of reading to be informed about the Holocaust, you read to see why human dignity and loving others is important. Even the [independent reading] Stephen Curry book. Instead of just reading about his life, you read and found the greater theme of his life, that it doesn’t matter what you have or don’t have, what you lack or have too much of. All you have to have is faith in God, an undying passion for what you do, and the will to do whatever it takes to become successful. This is what you took from the book, not just he went to college here or he did this in high school. Now you can apply it to other books and read with a purpose.

Writing: Reading is closely connected to writing as we become more conscious of paying attention to how an excellent writer captures our attention and communicates her ideas so that we can figure out how we can implement those same moves in our own writing. Students showed their understanding of this, as well as a growing sense of audience:

• Reading “Fish Cheeks” was exactly what I needed. The amount of description it provided really gave me a lot of inspiration and a sense of guidance on my personal narrative.
• (Letter to self voice) Without a message, writing is pointless. Writing can either be one of the most meaningless things you do, or it can be one of the most powerful things you do. Hopefully you’re using it correctly, and using it powerfully.
• I also want, as a writer, to move people with my paper.
• In my human dignity essay, I finally wrote an introduction that I felt good about.
• I learned how to conclude my essays on a strong, inspiring note, instead of a weak summary of what the reader just read. Telling people to take action in my neutrality essay is a good example of how I did that.

Thinking: Thinking is what we do as we read effectively, it’s why we discuss our reading—collaborating to deepen our own and others’ thinking—and it’s what we’re hammering out for public consumption in our writing, so it’s difficult to separate it from the other skills, but while realizing this organic connection, students also commented specifically on how reading drove them to further research and thinking, how the thinking formed by writing became deeply personal, and how seeing both sides of an argument can transform thinking: 

• Books such as Night and An Ordinary Man (Intro) helped me dive deeper into different wars and problems of the past and today. Learning about the past has been particularly exciting. I think I’ve spent multiple hours reading on different articles on the internet on World War 2, and it’s not just about the Holocaust and the wars in Europe. I’ve also read a lot on the wars in Asia and the Pacific. Not only have I researched on the past, but now that I think about it, I’ve spent a lot more time reading the news (something I don’t usually do).
• Another big thing that influenced me this year is the human dignity essay. This essay made me think of others in a way I never have. I used to be careless about how a homeless man is doing, or the charity box we see every day. But now I realized that those people aren’t just the poor or needy, but they are humans just like me. I have been very touched with this fact.
• (Letter to self voice) Seeing the other side of an argument is crucial because if you don’t, you just have one side to the story. Sounds a lot like bias to me. Something you always complain about is when sports analysts or reporters are biased to one side. Well, look in the mirror sometimes. Luckily you learned to listen this semester. Through all the group discussions, and all the times you disagreed with people, you were able to listen to their point of view and even had your mind changed at times. Keep doing this because once you go out into the real world, more people are gonna disagree with you. But you’ll also meet people who are going to change your mind.

Speaking/listening: Speaking and listening—discussion—are how we collaborate in order to deepen our own and others’ thinking: we arrive at deeper insights as we make our own thinking available to others and avail ourselves of their thinking, synthesizing and building ideas. Both introverts and extroverts have their own challenges in making this collaborative effort successful, but they both articulated the importance of rising to those challenges:  

• I will be honest. I have not improved my communication skills at all this year. In fact, I think I am getting worse. This is because I now think before I say things. It sounds like a very good thing, but it isn’t if your brain moves at 10km/hr when others’ move at 80km/hr. I think I will get better as I go along because I just started this new way, and I am still not used to it. I hope I don’t give up on thinking just because I am slow…. Keep on thinking because that is what makes us humans different from other creatures.
• (This student compares how she felt during the first discussion of the year—the second day of school on the assigned summer reading of Things Fall Apart—to how she responded to a recent jigsaw discussion [she read the introduction to Nicholas Kristof’s book Half the Sky]): “Although I did read [Things Fall Apart], I was very insecure to express my opinion and was scared to jump into the discussion…. Since my [jigsaw] group was a very expressive group, it was hard to jump in, but I took the opportunity when I had the chance. I was given very little time to deliver all the information back to my [home] group, but I was able to summarize and organize everything in my head to explain clearly.”
• In order to respond to others, we have to listen to what they’re saying first. I actively listen to others now, to build off of their point, respond to what they said, and give feedback…. Discussions also require more thinking in a very short amount of time than I previously thought. Not just thinking about what I’m going to say (because then I’m not listening to them), but thinking about what they’re saying from their point of view in order for me to formulate a better and more impactful response.
• In the beginning of the year I would be the talker, never giving other people the chance to say their opinion. Now I see that it is better to listen. If you listen, wait till everyone has said their opinion, you could bounce off of everyone’s ideas and get the whole class involved.

I’m really pleased with what students have learned so far this school year—and getting excited about where we go from here, starting Monday! How do you get yourself and your students ready to launch into post-Christmas learning?

Besides, I DO know when I'll be back again: June!